Observations on the Road to...

Thursday, July 31, 2008

How I Spent My Summer Vacation: SDCC '08 Pt. 2

Check out my Flickr for photos from SDCC.

Attending San Diego Comic-Con requires an awful lot of energy, and especially more so if you go out after each day’s events inside the convention. By Friday morning of the con, my level of energy was pretty low. In fact, a little lower than I would have liked considering I had just come from spending a few days in New York. But, hey, it’s Comic-Con; you gotta suck it up for Comic-Con, right?

Although there wasn’t really any official Caballero meet-ups with the members of the former Brian K. Vaughan forum (now part of the current Tony Harris forum), I did get to hang out with a number of them here and there throughout the course of the weekend.

On preview night, I had dinner with Carrie and Stephanie and their friends, where Carrie her Ghost Whisperer-comic writing partner, Becky, and I geeked out on Indiana Jones and Star Wars.

Thursday night, I hung out with some friends from San Francisco that I hadn’t seen in quite a while, including my friend David Brothers, who was part of the comics-blogging panel at the end of the day, as well as the Japan-bound Mindy Owens. David may have complained about the lasagna having a little too much meat for him, but I think I was hungry enough, that there was probably too little for me. Anyway, twas a good meal.

Also got to hang out with Mike (Lagomorph), and Nick from the board on Friday night for dinner, before parting ways: they went to the Oni Press party, whereas I went back to the convention center for the tail end of the Eisners, before calling it quits for the night.

On Thursday I had a quick lunch with Capntightpants (David, I swear, I don’t know what it is, I just happened to know a swell of Davids) and his girlfriend. And then I also met up with them for the Joss Whedon panel on Friday. It was a packed panel, one in which I barely made it into, and right on time. Joss actually brought out his family that he worked with to create Dr. Horrible, as well as the cast of Dr. Horrible. The panel was awesome to say the least.

In fact, had I made it into the Watchmen panel, I definitely would not have made it into Whedon’s panel. To which, I was so fuckin close to getting into the Watchmen panel before being turned away because Hall H had reached capacity. And despite not making it into the panel, I had found a fellow complainer in Whitney Matheson when she told me that she didn’t get into the Watchmen panel either while we waited for the Entertainment Weekly: Filmmakers panel later in the day. Although we shared that in common, the fact that she still got to meet Zack Snyder, and I didn’t… well, one of the perks of being a member of the press.

To start things on Saturday morning, I went to the Black Panel, and there I found out about Method Man’s graphic novel, which I still gotta check out. Someone was dressed as Captain America at the panel, and I wish had gotten a photo of him, too. But I did take a picture of this person as bumblebee. Absolutely awesome! I missed out on getting into the writers of The Office panel, but I did make it into the Grant Morrison and Gerard Way panel, which was… well, do you need to know anything else other than Grant fuckin Morrison? And my favorite quote from the panel came from Gerard: "I don’t know what a Grammy means anymore, but I know what a Eisner means." Gerard and Gabriel Ba, of course having just won the Eisner for Best Limited Series the night before.

I ditched the last few hours of the con on Saturday to go to the Whitney Matheson / PopCandy meet-up at the Marriot’s roof-top Altitude bar, and for those PopCandy readers that rsvp’d for the meet-up were given Whitney’s Twitter-mini-comic. Online version found here!

I don’t leave any comments, and mostly ghost through the comments on Whitney’s blog, and didn’t rsvp for the meet-up, but being the kind and super-cool person she is, Whitney handed me the Twitter-mini-comic to me anyway.

After the meet-up, I grabbed a quick dinner by myself before crashing in my bed in my hotel. That is until I woke up around 11:30, and on the verge of stir crazy. Luckily, Lagomorph (who was still recovering from the previous night) was also getting a little stir crazy, and we met-up at Lime, and hung out for a few hours.

Sunday morning, I went to the Jack Kirby panel, and the last DC Comics panel of the weekend. It was actually the first DC panel I had gone to all weekend. It was a good one to go to since at the end of the panel, DC announced that Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert are gonna be doing a little Batman story early next year. After that panel, I spent the final day of the con roaming around the exhibit hall. Where I got a cute little sketch of Nightwing from Art Balthazar. I still have to scan it, though.


At the airport, a few San Francisco friends had their flight delayed, including my friend Aaron Farmer. I showed him my Noir Sketchbook, and since his flight delayed, he did me this sketch of a noir Starscream. Epic.

There’s a bunch of other things I did while in San Diego that I’m sure I didn’t even get to in these recaps that I’m just remembering now, like the Ed Brubaker panel, or Geoff Johns panel, the Boom Studios Drink Up / Gay Pride Party. Like that Starscream sketch, the whole con was just absolutely epic!

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